


earth tones

by thingswithwings



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M, Phone Calls & Telephones, Shore Leave
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-09-04
Updated: 2007-09-04
Packaged: 2017-10-24 03:13:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/258306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thingswithwings/pseuds/thingswithwings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sheppard isn’t even courteous enough to record a message.</p>
            </blockquote>





	earth tones

Sheppard isn’t even courteous enough to record a message; it’s just the mechanical woman’s voice reciting Sheppard’s phone number – which, hello, he just dialed – followed by a long, low beep. And while Rodney had plenty to say while the robot-lady progressed, torturously slowly, through her instructions on how to send a page or leave a callback number, piling up words behind his teeth, shifting impatiently in his chair, waiting for it, when the beep comes, he doesn’t speak.

The words disperse in a short release of breath that the voicemail probably picks up. Rodney hesitates, and he knows he should speak. The window of time in which he could reasonably have _started_ talking begins to recede.

He draws breath, determined to say something, anything, but then changes his mind abruptly, closing the cell phone against his ear.

-

Other times, when he calls Sheppard, he doesn’t get past the dial tone.

Sheppard calls him, though, and asks after Rodney’s lab or his Doom III high scores or his favourite pizza in Colorado Springs, and Rodney finds himself on the defensive, complaining about his sycophants or extolling the virtues of Guiseppe’s Depot on Sierra Madre Street for hours at a time.

When he hangs up after those calls, Rodney feels like Sheppard’s pulled something, a bait-and-switch; he feels like maybe Sheppard’s home and staring at his call display every single time Rodney wrestles with the voicemail and breathes after the beep.

-

Sheppard’s phone rings eight times, nine, ten. It’ll go to voicemail on the twelfth ring. Rodney is bracing himself for the recording when he’s stopped short by John’s voice, rough and low and too close to the receiver.

“Hey, Rodney.”

“What? It’s two a.m., why are you answering your phone?” Rodney demands.

Sheppard doesn’t speak for a long time.

“Okay, that was a dumb thing to say,” Rodney admits, finally.

“Yeah.”

There’s another long pause, and it’s like the post-beep silence all over again.

“How you doing?” Sheppard asks.

“I’m fine.”

“Okay.”

Rodney hesitates. “I don’t remember why I was calling you, to be honest.”

“You were calling to breathe heavily into my voicemail, McKay,” Sheppard says. His voice still has that late-night roughness to it, that dream-adjacent slowness that somehow makes Rodney think of the stubble on Sheppard’s jaw, the way his eyes might be closed while he talks on the phone in the dark, bare arm above the covers holding the receiver to his ear.

“Yeah,” Rodney agrees. His bedroom is dark, too, the blankets too hot.

“I’ll call you tomorrow. You still coming into town for the weekend?”

“Yeah,” Rodney says again. Him and Sheppard and Carson and maybe Elizabeth, all going for dinner, nothing untoward.

He can hear Sheppard swallow over the line, then the sound of his lips parting slowly.

“Kay.”

The line goes dead, and after a while the swift beep-beep-beep that tells him to hang up the phone gets annoying enough for him to close his cell.

When he wakes in the morning, his phone is still in his hand.


End file.
